Movies

Movies: Director McDonagh makes a good man a little easier to find

Writer-director John Michael McDonagh on location for "Calvary." (Provided by Fox Searchlight)

John Michael McDonagh (AP Photo/Starpix, Amanda Schwab)

John Michael McDonagh and actor Brendan Gleeson were sitting in a pub in Galway, Ireland. They had come to the end of the shoot for the writer-director's debut feature, 2011's inspired dark comedy "The Guard," which paired Gleeson's coarse Irish police sergeant with Don Cheadle's tightly wound FBI agent.

"We were a bit sad we were leaving Galway. So Brendan, myself, Don and a lot of the cast and crew were in a pub until three in the morning," McDonagh recalled on the phone one recent afternoon.

"We got to the point in the evening when Brendan said, 'What do you want to do next?' drunkenly."

McDonagh told him he'd like to write a film about a good priest. "Oh, I always wanted to play a good man," Gleeson replied.

"Of course you wake up in the morning with a hangover and he can go off and make another film. But I have to write the script."

And what a script "Calvary" turned out to be.

Opening Aug. 8, it is a darkly comedic affair that poses grave moral questions with darkly comedic flair and compassion.

The burly Irish actor Gleeson portrays Father James, parish priest in a seaside Irish village. One day, a confessor we hear but don't see tells Father James to ready his affairs. In a week's time, they're to meet on the beach, where the confessor will kill him.

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Why? The confessor details for Father James the sexual abuses he suffered at the hands of a priest. Granted, he could exact revenge by murdering a guilty priest, but a good priest — now that would make a point. And so the countdown to Father James' execution date begins. There are doubts and denial, the stuff of any worthy crucible, hence the movie's title.

There is also no shortage of candidates for this who-will-do-it mystery. Audiences drawn into the story may forget that Father James knows from the start the identity of his would-be assassin.

McDonagh, like his older brother playwright Martin McDonagh, has a gift for casting. Populating the village are a rancorous bunch played by Chris O'Dowd, Dylan Moran, Aidan Gillen (Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish in "Game of Thrones") and Isaach de Bankole. M. Emmet Walsh portrays an ailing expat American author. In a telling twist, Kelly Reilly plays Fiona, Father James' suicidal daughter.

In Washington, D.C., for the film, McDonagh was just back from lunch with Gleeson. "We went from one boozy night to a boozy lunch," he said with a laugh.

At the time of that first indulgence, McDonagh believed there would be a glut of films about bad priests. "The scandals were hitting one after another," he said. While there have been a number of documentaries about the Catholic Church's failure to punish pedophile priests, the feature film glut has yet to materialize.

"Maybe the story is too fresh, the scandals so horrific that people have shied away from dealing with it," he offered. "Maybe it's like Vietnam where it had to be 10 years later before people had to deal with it properly."

The challenge became — in this day and heightened age of anti-heroes and utterly watchable villains — how to get a good man to drive the narrative?

"The solution I came up with was to have everyone else in town be appalling. You would hope you'd never come into an Irish village with these characters. They're so angry. They're so confrontational," said McDonagh.

"I'm a big fan of Preston Sturges, of his screwball comedies," he said. "All those characters in those screwball comedies are very literate, very witty. That is my kind of tone when I'm writing the script. That means all the characters are going to be quite heightened. We've got a lot of eccentrics and a lot of grotesques. They're the ones that start to drive the story forward."

Listen to McDonagh and it quickly becomes clear he's an avid student of filmmaking. His films represent lessons he's taken to heart about storytelling.

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